An Unrealistic Ideal
Women in our society are subject to a great deal pressure to
conform to an unrealistic ideal of beauty, and since it is almost impossible
for most of them to reach that ideal, they are often uncomfortable about their
appearance. Entire industries have grown up to profit from that discomfort and
to sell them products that they hope will allow them to approach the ideal. We
have skincare and haircare products; we have makeup; we have diets for losing
weight; we have gyms with exercises for toning the thighs or for maintaining a
flat abdomen.
Why do we have such an ideal, and what is the source of the
pressure to measure up to it? Some feminists have claimed that the ideal comes
from men. It is a product of the patriarchy, and as such, it is just one more
way in which the patriarchy maintains its domination over women. However, this
view is incomplete because it ignores the role of competition for social status,
which is common among both men and women. A person’s appearance is an
expression of her or his social status, and this is especially true of women.
In the past, when few professional opportunities were open to women, their
appearance expressed the social status of the men who supported them, but
today, most women have jobs and even careers, and their social status is not
dependent on that of their male partners. Instead, their appearance expresses
their own social status.
The ideal of personal appearance that women face demands
extreme slimness along with baby-soft skin. A woman is even expected to have soft
skin on her heels as if she never had to walk anywhere! The ideal also demands
that her hair always be perfectly arranged and that her make-up be perfectly
applied. In addition, she must wear just the right, fashionable clothes along
with just the right shoes and other accessories. None of this is possible for
most women because it costs too much both in money and in time, So, what does
the ideal really represent, and where does it come from?
The Theory of the Leisure Class
In 1899, the American economist Thorstein Veblen published The
Theory of the Leisure Class, and in it he argued that society is composed
of two classes: those who work and those who live from the work of others. He
called the latter class “the leisure class,” and its members have much higher
social status than the members of the working class. They display their higher
status by publicly consuming products that show that they do not have to work and
also by engaging in activities that show that they are able to waste a lot of
time. For example, upper class men in Veblen’s day carried canes, and they wore
hats that they had to remove indoors. Carrying these objects left their hands
unavailable to do any work, and this demonstrated that they did not need to
work. Upper class women wore elaborate dresses that made it impossible for them
to do any work. Upper class people at that time ate long, elaborate meals, and
this showed that they could afford to waste the time that the meals required.
Much of our ideal of feminine beauty fits perfectly into
this framework. In a society where cheap food is widely available and our lives
are very sedentary, staying slim requires adhering to expensive diets and
spending time on exercise routines to maintain muscle tone and consume
calories. Living up to the ideal of baby-like skin in middle age is also extremely
expensive and time-consuming. Wearing “just the right clothes” costs a lot, and
women easily recognize cheap copies of expensive brands. Having perfect hair
and makeup is not only expensive, it is also very time-consuming. A woman who
aspires to perfect hair and makeup can easily spend an hour or two each morning
“putting on her face,” and if she goes out in the evening, she can spend
another hour or two getting ready for that. Very few women can spare several
hours a day on doing their hair and make-up.
The fact that most women cannot measure up to the ideal is
not accidental. A social hierarchy cannot exist if everyone can meet the
requirements for entering the top ranks. As Gilbert and Sullivan put it, “If
everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.” A social institution cannot be
exclusive if it doesn’t exclude anyone. The exclusion of the many is the price
of the prestige of the few.
Pretending to Belong to the Leisure Class
The prestige can be high for those who can manage to
approximate the ideal even in middle age. For example, Elizabeth
Hurley, who is in her mid-fifties, receives endless prestige, envy, admiration
and publicity when she poses in bikinis, but it is worth noting that she is
never photographed doing the work that she must obviously do in order to
continue to look the way she does at her age. Her publicity makes it seem as
though the whole thing were effortless, and of course, nothing is said about
the fact that the photos really serve as ads for the bikinis that are sold by
her company. She is made to appear to be a member of the leisure class, and
that is the crux of the matter. A woman who aspires to live up to our ideal
of beauty must look as if she never had to work, and she if she can do that,
she can attain the high social status that a life of leisure brings.
There is something archaic in all of this because today, the
leisure class has almost disappeared. Today, most women who can afford to dress
stylishly work for their money. Think for example of Miranda Priestly in The
Devil Wears Prada. She believes in the ideal, and in many ways, she
embodies it, but the strain that she is under shows itself in many ways. She
has no time for her husband, and she routinely mistreats her employees. We see
her in tears when she learns that her husband is leaving her, but we also see
her telling her young assistant Andy that “Everyone wants to be us.”
Today’s women who try to live up to the ideal must in
effect, pretend to be members of the leisure class. They present themselves as
if they didn’t have to work, although everyone knows that they do. They
adopt hair styles that minimize the time they need to spend on their hair, and
they learn to do their makeup in a minimum of time. They go to yoga or Pilates
classes after work. And somehow, they try to fit in time to spend with the
people they love. The strain of all of this tells on them. They are tired, and
they are frustrated. The source of the frustration and fatigue is the unrealism
of the idea that an impractical and time-consuming appearance is an expression
of high social status in a world where most women of high social status work
for a living. We all know that the ideal is absurd and outdated, but it is difficult
for a person to abandon it without stepping aside from the almost universal
competition for social status that is a central part of life in our society.
